WASHINGTON >> Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell is proposing to postpone the start of Donald Trump’s impeachment trial for a week or more to give the former president time to review the case.
House Democrats who voted for Trump’s impeachment last week for inciting the January 6 Capitol riots signaled that they want a quick trial when President Joe Biden begins his term, saying that a reckoning is needed before the country – and Congress – can move on.
But McConnell told his fellow Republican senators in a phone call on Thursday that a short delay would give Trump time to prepare and raise his legal team, ensuring due process.
Indiana Sen. Mike Braun said after the call that the trial could not begin “until mid-February”. He said it was “due to the fact that the process as it took place in the House has evolved so quickly, and that it does not match the time you need to prepare for a defense in a Senate trial.”
The timing will be set by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who could trigger the start of the trial when she sends the House charges of “incitement to insurrection” to the Senate, and also by McConnell and the new Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, who are in negotiations on how to establish a 50-50 party division in the Senate and the short-term agenda.
Schumer is in charge of the Senate, taking over as the majority leader after Democrats won two new Senate seats in Georgia and Vice President Kamala Harris was sworn in on Wednesday. But with such a narrow division, Republicans will have something to say about the trial procedure.
Democrats hope to conduct the proceedings while passing legislation that is a priority for Biden, including coronavirus relief, but would also need some cooperation from Senate Republicans to do so.
Schumer told reporters on Thursday that he was still negotiating with McConnell about how to conduct the trial, “but make no mistake. There will be a trial, there will be a vote, up or down or to condemn the president. “
Pelosi can send the article to the Senate as early as Friday. Democrats say the process must move forward quickly because everyone has witnessed the siege, many of them fleeing in search of security as the rebels reached the Capitol.
“It will be soon, I don’t think it will take long, but we have to do it,” said Pelosi on Thursday. She said Trump did not deserve a “prison card” in his second historic impeachment just because he stepped down and Biden and others are calling for national unity.
Without the White House attorney’s office to defend him – as he did at his first trial last year – Trump’s allies have been looking for lawyers to defend the case of the now ex-president. Members of her previous legal teams have indicated that they do not plan to join the effort, but South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham told Republican Party colleagues on Thursday that Trump was hiring South Carolina attorney Butch Bowers, according to a person familiar with the call who has been granted anonymity to discuss it. Bowers did not immediately respond to a message on Thursday.
Processing the Chamber’s case will be Pelosi’s nine impeachment managers, who have been meeting regularly to discuss the strategy. Pelosi said he would speak to them “in the next few days” about when the Senate would be ready for a trial, indicating that the decision could extend until next week.
Trump told thousands of supporters to “fight like hell” against the election results that Congress was certifying on January 6, just before an angry mob stormed the Capitol and stopped counting. Five people, including a Capitol police officer, died in chaos, and the House accused the president of leaving a week later, with 10 Republicans joining all Democrats in support.
Pelosi said it would be “harmful to unity” to forget that “people died here on January 6, in an attempt to undermine our election, to undermine our democracy, to dishonor our Constitution”.
Bowers represented elected officials and political candidates in South Carolina on government and electoral law issues. He served as a special adviser on voting issues at the United States Department of Justice under President George W. Bush and served as an adviser to former governors. Nikki Haley and Mark Sanford.
He guided Haley, the former Trump ambassador to the United Nations, through an ethics case and worked for Sanford when state lawmakers considered his impeachment after revelations that Sanford had left the state to see a mistress in Argentina in 2009.
Members of Trump’s defense team are expected to be announced soon, said a person familiar with Graham’s comments.
Graham did not answer questions about Trump’s representation on Capitol Hill on Thursday. But he told reporters that “I think he will have a legal team here soon”.
Trump was acquitted by the Senate in February after his White House legal team, aided by his personal lawyers, aggressively fought the House’s charges that he had encouraged the President of Ukraine to investigate Biden in exchange for military aid. This time, Pelosi noted, the Chamber does not seek to condemn the president through private conversations, but through a very public insurrection that they themselves experienced and which was broadcast live on television.
“This year, the whole world has witnessed the incitement of the president,” said Pelosi.
Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the second Senate Democrat, said it was too early to know how long a trial would take, or whether Democrats would like to call witnesses. But he said “you don’t have to tell us what was going on with the crowd scene, we were running down the stairs to escape.”
McConnell, who said this week that Trump “teased” his supporters before the riot, did not say how he would vote. He told his colleagues in the Republican Party that it would be a vote of conscience.
Democrats would need the support of at least 17 Republicans to condemn Trump, a high bar. While some Senate Republicans have indicated that they are open to sentencing, most said they believed a trial would cause division and questioned the legality of trying a president after he stepped down.
Graham said that if he were Trump’s lawyer, he would focus on that argument as well as the merits of the case, whether it was “incitement” under the law. He agreed with Pelosi that a trial should be swift.
“I think the public record is your television screen,” said Graham. “So, I don’t see why it would take so long.”